mastodon
4.6.0-nightly.2026-03-16
I write about tech + humans + philosophy
sam altman has never once said anything that wasn’t already on a motivational poster in a dentist’s waiting room
Conservatives built an economy that requires two incomes to do what one did and then blamed women for going to work
you dont HAVE to have an 18 step morning routine. you could simply. wake up. and exist for a while. this is legal
I am so tired of being right about things I didn’t want to be right about
It was the fuck around of times, it was the find out of times
every open plan office was designed by someone with a corner office
The South Sea Bubble ruined Isaac Newton and produced a century of regulatory caution. The $TRUMP memecoin ruined 813,000 wallets and produced a gala dinner. The distance between those two responses is the distance the casino has traveled. It moved from the margins of economic life to the center of political power, and somewhere along the way, the shame burned off completely.
the housing market isn't actually broken. it is working exactly as designed by the people who own the houses.
All we did was give stupid people faster access to other stupid people and now we act surprised when the stupidity compounds
It is genuinely not that complicated. Some people have too much. Most people have too little. One of these groups funds think tanks.
posting “I’m taking a break from social media” on social media and then checking how many likes it gets is a very specific kind of modern illness
The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial "logic" that we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life...
the audacity of a country that doesn't have paid parental leave telling other countries their family values are wrong
the word "ecosystem" should be banned from business communication until people demonstrate they understand what an ecosystem is
The average punter does not want to build software.
They don't want to prompt software.
They don’t want to describe software.
They don't particularly want to think about software.
They want to tap, swipe and scroll with zero friction and next-to-zero cognitive input.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ai-twitters-favourite-lie-everyone-wants-to-be-a-developer/
"Facts don't care about your feelings" has apparently mutated into "if I'm hurting your feelings I must be stating a fact" which is a logical fallacy because it's entirely possible to be a fucking arsehole and be wrong at the same time. The correlation is probably positive.
The modern internet argument cycle: someone posts an opinion. Someone else screenshots it. A third person quote-tweets the screenshot with "this is wild." A fourth person writes a thread about the thread. Nobody has changed their mind. Everyone has lost 40 minutes. The sun sets on another day of human progress.
"I don't have time to read" says the absolute character who spent 4 hours last night watching a stranger rank every fast food burger on YouTube
The GTM Engineering Playbook
(How to build the machine that builds the pipeline)
https://www.selfonomics.com/p/the-gtm-engineering-playbook-part
If you prioritise "sign up" over "login" on your landing page to the point that existing users have to search for the button, you are holding your existing users in contempt. And you're an arsehole to boot.
Every suburb in Australia has a bloke who's been "nearly finished" renovating his bathroom for 4 years. The tiles are in. The grout is not. He has opinions about grout. He will share them. You didn't ask. He doesn't care. The grout is coming and so is the monologue.
The doomers and the accelerationists share a singular trait: they've both decided the future is already determined and that human agency is irrelevant to whatever happens next. Both positions are comforting, because both relieve you of the burden of actually doing something.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/a-soft-landing-manual-for-the-second-gilded-age/
There are three types of knowledge workers. The ones who do the work. The ones who schedule meetings about the work. And the ones who create Notion templates to track the meetings about the work. The third group has the most LinkedIn followers.
"I specifically can't relate to this character" has become the dominant form of art criticism and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen. Imagine telling Kafka you're not a giant bug so the story doesn't resonate. The entire point of fiction is feeling something about someone who isn't you. We used to know this.
There's a tragedy-of-the-commons dynamic in automated outreach. Every company automating mass email makes cold outreach worse for every other company doing the same thing.
The equilibrium is ugly.
https://thisisstudioself.substack.com/p/the-gtm-engineering-playbook-part
All you need to know about the tech industry is that the people building tools to "connect humanity" haven't spoken to their neighbours in 6 years
The future is undetermined, the stakes are enormous, and the work is ours to do.
That's the most optimistic thing I can imagine.
The future is still up for grabs.
So grab it.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/a-soft-landing-manual-for-the-second-gilded-age/
Brutal week. And a hard year so far. If you’ve got some good vibes and some luck to spare feel free to send some my way 🖤
My roommate Malcolm Gladwell just spent 45 minutes explaining why the way I load the dishwasher is "a microcosm of Western institutional decay." I put a bowl on the wrong rack. He's now drafting a chapter about it. I just want clean plates, Malcolm.
Tool selection matters less than most people believe.
Process design and execution matter more.
Meet the GTM engineer's playbook:
https://www.thisisstudioself.com/insights/gtm-engineering-playbook
My kid asked what I do for work and I said "I write on the internet" and he said "so nothing" and this is the most accurate job description I've ever received
Every couple on the internet: "People always ask how we make it work"
Nobody asked. Not a single person asked. You posted a reel in matching outfits and answered a question that existed exclusively in your head.
The quickest way to find out someone has a podcast is to exist near them for more than 4 minutes
The podcast industrial complex has reached the point where two guys can sit in a room and say nothing for 3 hours and call it "long form content" and somehow that's a career now. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I've been trying to get paid for saying nothing for years.
Every "build in public" AI-guy is just a dude who automated his to-do list and is now mass spamming people about it like he split the atom. You used a Pi wrapper to move a Trello card, mate. Sit down.
"You need to build your personal brand" no thank you, I have a personality. That's the same thing but free and I don't have to write a Notion doc about it.
Humans are spectacular at remembering disasters, passed down in every format from the written word to the oral tradition. We are (for obvious reasons) terrible at remembering the disasters that didn't happen...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/
Not one single "free thinker" who told me to "question everything" in 2020 has questioned a single thing since 2024. Turns out questioning everything meant questioning the specific things that made you feel smart at parties.
Every tech CEO right now: "We need to move fast and break things"
The thing they're breaking: their own terms of service
The thing they're moving fast toward: a government contract
